The Cat and the Old Man

 

 

The boy is standing at the kitchen sink drinking his coffee when it occurs to him the cat isn’t there. Every morning, the cat meets the first one up in the kitchen to rub ankles and cry for breakfast. But today, the boy is alone, looking out the window over the sink at the oaks and hickories that crowd out the light in the back yard. He looks around the kitchen to see if the cat is maybe under the table, or over in the corner by the refrigerator. He walks out the back door onto the covered deck and checks in the cat’s bed, where it has dragged old towels and rags and made a bed to nap with its stuffed owl and frog. But the cat isn’t there.

The boy walks back into the house and down the hall to the old man’s room. The old man is sitting in the pink wingback chair beside the bed, in the morning gloom.

“It must have been a titanic struggle,” the old man says. He talks like that, always has. “Titanic.”

“What?” the boy says.

“The cat. It must have been a real donnybrook.”

“Where is he?” the boy asks.

“He’s in his bed. He buried himself under those old towels and rags.”

The boys looks back around, over his shoulder. “He’s dead?”

“Yes,” the old man says. He doesn’t move. His voice is coming out of that corner beside the bed.

***

The cat found the boy on an old wooden dock at Clark Lake one late summer night when the boy was 12 years old. He was standing on the dock in front of his aunt’s log cabin cottage, looking out over the water under a clear cool and starry sky. Late summer in northern Wisconsin is often like that – clear, cool, starry. When he turned to walk back to shore he heard a noise, a small peep or squeal that startled him because he didn’t recognize it. He froze and then he felt a small critter rub against his ankle. He knew it was a cat then, and it cried. It was tiny, and black, and almost invisible on the moonless night. He bent down and picked up the kitten and held it against his chest with one hand and the cat put all four paws on the boy’s chest and then climbed up and rubbed his face on the boy’s chin and nose and cheeks. The boy had never known a cat to do that, and for the rest of his life he never knew another cat to do it, either. The boy held the cat in one hand as the cat enveloped the boy in openness. The boy felt then that if the cat could talk, he knew what it would say. The boy walked slowly back toward the cottage, with the cat held firmly to his chest, and around the cottage and out to the road where his mother and the old man stood against their car waiting. The boy’s parents were young then, not much more than 30. The boy walked up to his parents and asked to keep the cat.

“He walked up to me,” he said.

He could tell the old man was against it. He didn’t say anything, but looked to the side. The old man didn’t like cats.

“I don’t know,” the mother said. She looked at her husband, who remained silent. He was leaning back against the Ford.

The boy was not given to emotional displays. He did not cry or beg. “He likes me,” he said.

The boy had had one pet in his life. A dog, small and black and white, named Pepper. His parents had brought it home from the animal shelter and they had worked to train it, taking it out behind the garage to “do its business,” as his mother said. The boy played with the dog often, but the boy was very young and had a short attention span. Still, he loved the dog and was beginning to understand it and how much it needed him when he came home from school one day and it was gone. His mother told him that they had returned Pepper to the shelter where they would find him a new home. His mother told him that Pepper would be better off. The old man said “the situation was unsustainable.” The boy didn’t understand, of course, and it wasn’t until many years later when the boy asked why that his mother explained. The boy was a sickly child back then, the mother said, prone to colds and flu and fevers, and he kept getting up in the middle of the night to go sleep on the kitchen floor, where the dog was penned up. His parents would find the boy there in the morning, often suffering from some ailment. And so they sent the dog away, to spare the boy. His broken heart was another matter. The boy assumed all his life that the dog was adopted again from that shelter and did have a better life. The boy always assumed, or at least hoped for, the best.

“Bring it along,” the mother said. “Just for tonight.”

They got in the car then and drove across the Door County peninsula to their own little cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan. The boy’s mother took the cat outside that night and stood over it as it “did its business.” The boy took the cat to bed with him that night and held it while it purred and until it fell asleep. Sometime during the night the cat moved out of the boy’s bed and into his parents’ room, where they found it asleep in the morning, next to the old man.

The boy wanted nothing more in life than to be loved by that cat, and the cat knew it. Every night, for as long as the boy lived with his parents, the cat went to bed with the boy. And every morning the old man would wake up with the cat beside him. “Good morning,” he would say, and stroke the cat a couple of times along his full length. The two would get up then and go out the kitchen for breakfast together. There was never any doubt, from that first morning on, that the cat belonged to the old man.

When it was time to go, the boy moved away from home, first for school and then to have his own life. He lived apart from the cat much longer than he lived with it. But the boy came home to visit often enough and when he did the cat was always there to meet him in the kitchen, crying, and the boy would pick it up and hold it as the cat rubbed his head all over the boy’s face, and the boy would laugh.

***

The boy walks back out to the deck and looks more closely at the cat’s bed. He sees there, between the old towels and rags, a bit of jet black fur. The cat had come home and covered himself in his rags, and the stuffed owl and frog, to die.

The boy bends over to pull back the towels, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he walks back into the house and sits at the kitchen table with another cup of coffee. Soon the old man comes out and sits across from him with his own cup. And then the mother comes out. She rubs her hand on the boy’s back before she too sits at the table.

“Well,” the old man says. “I looked him over a bit and covered him back up. He is cut up a little. It looks like he got into it with some critter.” He pauses and looks up from his cup. He starts to speak, but stops and looks back down.

“You two get up now and bury that cat,” the mother says. “Don’t just sit here. You take him out in the yard and you give him a good burial and be done with it. That cat loved you for nearly twenty years. Now you take care of him.” She gets up and walks away.

The old man and the boy sit for a minute, and then stand together. The old man gathers up the cat in his bed, with his towels and rags and stuffed animals, and starts for the back yard. “Bring the shovels,” he says to the boy. “From the garage.”

“I know where they are,” the boy says.

Out back, near where the yard ends a small stand of oaks and hickory begins, the old man lays the cat bed on the ground. The boy hands him a shovel, and he starts to dig. He cuts out a big hole in the sod, almost big enough for a person, and then starts to dig deeper. He digs for about ten minutes and then stops and the boy begins to dig. They take turns, the man and the boy, being careful to pile the loose dirt away from the cat. They dig all morning until they have a hole four feet deep.

“That’s quite a crypt,” the old man says.

The boy slides his hands and arms under the cat’s bed and slowly lifts it over to the old man, standing in the hole. He lowers the bed, bends over and folds the towels so that the cat is completely covered.

The two of them quickly shovel the loose dirt into the hole. The boy picks up a nearby large rock and places it on top of the dirt. They stand silently for a minute.

“He’ll be OK” the old man says. “He’ll be safe down there.”

The two men put away their shovels, go into the kitchen, and pour two cups of coffee. They sit across from each other at the old linoleum kitchen table, which the boy’s parents bought when they built the house more than 30 years ago.

The boy’s mother walks in then and stands at the table between them. “You two,” she says, looking first at the boy and then at the old man. “Nothing to say. Nothing. You just sit there like two hard bumps on a log. You just put the only thing either of you ever loved in the ground and nothing. You… Old man. That cat was everything to you. Can you shed a tear, or even say a kind word? And boy, you’re just like your old man. I remember when you brought that cat to us at the lake. I know about you. … Nothing to say either. Right?

“Have either of you ever even talked to each other? Have you, old man? Have you ever told the boy how you feel about him? About anything? Hugged him when he comes to visit? You shake his hand… that’s what you do. Shake his hand.

“Boy, you’re just the same. Do you love your parents? Did you love that cat? I’ll tell you what… that cat lovedyou. Loved you both. You’re going to miss that cat for the rest of your lives. … And now all you’ve got is each other. That’s right. That’s it.”

She walks away. The old man and the boy look up from their coffee mugs then and at each other. They look into each other’s eyes, and slowly, each cracks a slight, almost invisible, smile